Chip mounters are apparatuses for surface-mounting an electronic component onto a printed circuit board (PCB), and perform operations of receiving and moving various electronic components, such as integrated circuits (ICs), diodes, capacitors, and resistors, from a component provider to surface-mounting locations of a PCB, and then surface-mounting the various electronic components on the PCB.
The chip mounters generally include a tape feeder for providing a carrier tape including a component, a conveyer for transferring a PCB, a head assembly including nozzles to pick up the component from the tape feeder and surface-mount the component onto the PCB, and a driving apparatus for moving the head assembly in a horizontal or vertical direction.
Generally, the tape feeder continuously provides a carrier tape including an electronic component while separating a cover tape attached to a surface of the carrier tape, thereby exposing the electronic component for the head assembly to pick it up. The carrier tape from which the cover tape is separated is discharged in front of the tape feeder, and the cover tape separated from the carrier tape is discharged at the rear of the tape feeder.
If the cover tape separated from the carrier tape is not quickly collected, the cover tape formed of very thin vinyl material may get tangled, and generate static electricity or interfere with other components of the tape feeder, and thus overall operations of the tape feeder and the chip mounter may have to be stopped.
US 2003/0230617 (published on 18 Dec. 2003) discloses a tape feeder including a mechanism for separating a cover tape separated from a carrier tape. In such a tape feeder, the carrier tape and the cover tape are separately collected by completely separating the cover tape from the carrier tape. Accordingly, separate components need to be installed in the tape feeder in order to continuously wind the separated cover tape or to transfer the separated cover tape to a separate collection unit and discharge the separated cover tape, and thus the number of components of the tape feeder is increased and a volume of the tape feeder is also increased.